Hello Patreon backers, this is Allison and you are listening to our Red Minus episode for the month of May.

So one thing that we got into on this month's main episode was the history of Palestine, the history of Zionism and the history of Israeli occupation.

And I went fairly in depth into that history as best as I could while not trying to bog the episode down too much.

And part of that meant cutting out a lot of things that I had really wanted to include in that history.

And one of the things that I ended up deciding to cut out after doing quite a bit of research on it with the help of several fantastic and amazing Jewish comrades who helped providing me with resources and information that I could work on is the history of Jewish occupation to Zionism.

I think this is a really important history and a really important story that many people aren't familiar with.

But ultimately it kind of fell aside the scope of the episode.

So for this month's Patreon episode, I'm kind of taking some of those notes that I had and expanded on them a little bit further to really kind of do a deep dive into the history and present day Jewish opposition to Zionism and why that history matters.

So that's what we're going to be doing here today. We don't have bread on this episode. It's just me with sort of everything that I've compiled after all of this.

I'm hoping this will be a helpful resource to you. I'm going to go ahead and just kind of jump right into it.

And once we get to the end, we do a little bit of reflection on why this history matters for understanding colonialism, subtler colonialism and opposition.

So kind of to get started, I think we need to consider some of the ideological contours of Zionism in more depth than we had time to during our official episode for this month.

Many have argued that Zionism is a religious phenomenon based maybe on Hebrew prophecy or teachings within the Torah.

But this is a largely historically incorrect view which actually obscures what's at play in Zionism and in kind of a dangerously and potentially anti-Semitic manner seeks to kind of group the critique of Zionism, subtler colonialism and with the critique of Judaism and Jewish values.

And we need to put it back against that very strongly. So I want to think about Zionism a little bit more.

We can acknowledge, of course, that within Jewish liturgy and culture, there's references to Israel as a place and there has been mourning before the Roman displacement of Jews which occurred in the wake of the Jewish rebellion against the Romans.

But these cultural and religious aspects here have not historically been interpreted as a nationalist project which should be actualized through violence and occupation.

Until relatively recently, Zionism was from the beginning a secular project. It was grounded in nationalism and colonialism.

Zionism emerged at a time of nationalist fervor in which imperialist nations themselves started to deploy the language of self-determination to justify their actions.

In the late 19th century and early 20th century, we saw many groups around the globe begin to conceptualize themselves as nations and demand national autonomy.

Theodore Herzl, who we got into in our main episode, was clearly impacted by these perspectives.

Herzl's early writings on the necessity of a Jewish state are actually remarkably secular, with references to Jewish religion largely focused on ensuring in his adherence that the Jewish state would be a modern secular state, which would keep religion in its rightful place.

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